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And life created continents...

LIFE on Earth may have driven the evolution of the planet itself. The idea is that ancient microbes provided the chemical energy to create the Earth’s continents – a nod to the Gaia hypothesis, in which life helps create the conditions it needs to survive.

The theory would solve the puzzle of why the Earth’s continental crust appeared when it did, and explain the presence of granite, a substance not found anywhere else in our solar system.

The Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, coalescing as a homogeneous mass that in time separated into the discrete layers we …